Photo-tour of facilities

School Address

3, 510 – 77th Ave. SE, Calgary, Alberta, T2H 1C3

About this school:

Third Academy is Calgary's school for special needs. We create a well-balanced, individualized, integrated, and intensive program for each student, designed to prepare them for re-entry into their community school as quickly as possible. An Individualized Program Plan (IPP) is developed for each student, building upon their strengths and remediating learning challenges. Lesson content responds to the needs of each student while adhering to the Alberta Education curriculum.

Reviews:

User-submitted reviews (none submitted)

The Our Kids review of The Third Academy

It’s often said that, within the world of private schooling, there is a school to suit the needs of every learner. Certainly, Third Academy is an excellent demonstration of that. For more than two decades, the school has been providing academic support for students with a range of learning differences, both within the classroom setting and beyond. Parents look to the school to provide personal, tailored support for their learner, as well as heightened teacher student attention, and that’s precisely what they find. Learning assessment is offered on site by staff psychologists and SLP/OT therapists, and instruction is conducted by faculty with a wealth of experience within this academic segment. In all, it’s a full package, one designed to support academic and socio-emotional disabilities or disorders, and the school’s reputation for success is well earned. A sister program, recently recast as Willow Home Education, extends the work of Third Academy through support to parents who homeschool. The ideal student is one who isn’t thriving within a conventional school setting, and who can benefit from hands-on, student directed support and instruction.

School busing:

Third Academy offers bus transferring.
Service options offered are regular rider, regular rider AM only, regular rider PM only, occasional rider, door-to-door pickup . The regions it offers busing from are Calgary, Okotoks, Cochrane. Additional notes: Third Academy operates their own fleet of school buses Highly trained school bus drivers are understand children with special needs and work with our Transportation Manager, Principals, and Teachers to ensure that riding the school bus is a positive experience for your child.
The level of bus service provided by Third Academy is based on individual student’s needs and our ability to operate a bus system effectively. Priority is given to students requiring a shared ride service but are unable to ride Calgary Transit and are ineligible for Access Calgary.
Depending on student need and road conditions, door-to-door service may be provided with most Third Academy students picked up a short distance from their home. Our bus drivers use cell phone text messaging to communicate with parents (only while parked at a safe location) to ensure parents and students know when to walk out to meet their bus.

… growing through our daily experiences, relationships and interactions with the world. Third Academy is pleased to be a school of choice that offers specialized education to over 150 amazing special needs students of life.

For 20 years, our focus has been on healing, inspiring and educating children with various abilities, to ensure they gain the emotional, social, behavioral and learning skills that will support them throughout their lives. With a dedicated team of professionals- teachers, psychologists, SLP/OT therapists, instructional support staff and school bus drivers- we are able to deliver exceptional learning in a caring and compassionate environment.

As every child is unique, our programming is individualized, well-balanced and utilizes a multitude of learning strategies and tools. We teach what students need, the way they need it and never lose sight of well-rounded learning. Students are offered equal opportunities and every child is encouraged to believe in themselves. Ultimately, it’s all about student success!

Our doors are always open and we invite you to visit us any time. We are all part of a larger community and together we will continue to achieve success for our children and families.

What Third Academy says: Central to The Third Academy’s programming is an emphasis on Personal Development. Personal Development looks to ‘heal the heart’. That is to say, deal with underlying emotional issues that stop the student from learning. By changing the way a student ‘thinks’ and ‘feels’ about themselves, we are able to change the way they ‘act’.
There are many teaching strategies/methodologies that have a positive impact on student learning. The choice of which strategies/methodologies to use is dependant upon what works best for the individual learner. In that way, the program is customized. The teacher determines- in partnership with the student and parents- which strategies/methodologies to use. Then, the teacher does ‘whatever it takes’ to meet the student’s needs. With excellent teachers, our students get the instruction they deserve. This is why we say: ‘Ultimately, the teacher is the program’.

By and large, we teach sex education free of any particular moral or ethical standpoint. We try not to impose any particular values or value systems (such as social, political, or ideological values) on our students when teaching sex and related issues.

Fairly value-based

Sex education is sometimes taught from a particular moral or ethical standpoint. Sometimes particular values or value systems (such as social, political, or ideological values) are invoked when teaching sex and related issues.

Traditional

This includes a range of positions. A traditional approach might, for example, go as far as emphasizing the nuclear family and complete abstinence from sex before marriage. Alternatively, this approach might simply involve placing less emphasis on sex outside of the context of marriage and more emphasis on abstinence. Or finally, it might just involve focusing less on sex outside of the context of marriage.

Progressive

This might mean more emphasis is placed on the importance of such things as social equality, diversity, and choice in sex education.

The main curriculum pace is non-standardized and is HIGHLY responsive to the pacing of individual students, (via differentiated instruction, differentiated assessment, etc). In theory, some students outpace the default/normalized curriculum, while others spend periods "behind schedule" if they need the extra time.

Flexible pacing:

Flexible pacing style

= offered

Subject-streaming (tracking)

Multi-age classrooms as standard

Ability-grouping (in-class) as common

Frequent use of cyber-learning (at-their-own-pace)

Regular guided independent study opportunities

Differentiated assessment

What Third Academy says about flexible pacing: This information is not currently available.

A school with a “supportive” academic culture focuses more on process than short-term outcomes: academic performance is a welcomed side-benefit, but not the driving focus. This does not mean the school lacks standards, or has low expectations for its students: a school can have a supportive academic culture and still light the fire of ambition in its students. It does mean, however, the school provides a less intensive culture than schools with a “rigorous” academic classification, and is focused more simply on instilling a love of learning and life-long curiosity.

Equal attention is paid to a balance of priorities: intellectual, emotional, social, and physical.

Secondary Developmental Priority: Emotional

Emotionally intelligent and confident individuals, capable of leading both themselves and others.

What Third Academy says: As every child is unique, our programming is individualized, well-balanced and utilizes a multitude of learning strategies and tools. We teach what students need, the way they need it and never lose sight of well-rounded learning. Students are offered equal opportunities and every child is encouraged to believe in themselves. Ultimately, it’s all about student success!

Very High

Third Academy is a full-time special needs school. All students at Third Academy are receiving some form of specialized support. The school therefore offeres a very high degree of special needs support.

Academic Support:

Support Type

= offered

Learning strategy and study counselling; habit formation

Extra support and minor accommodations for children experiencing subclinical difficulties

Mild but clinically diagnosed ADHD

Support Type

= offered

Accommodations

Formal adjustments are made to the delivery of lessons to help mitigate the learning difficulty or exceptionality. The underlying content and expectations remain unchanged with accommodations, however. (Example: allowing a student to write tests in a quieter room).

Modifications

The underlying content and expectations are modified and/or simplified for the sake of the student. (Examples: allowing student to use a calculator on a test when other students can't; allowing students to bring word-banks or "cheat sheets" into certain tests, etc)

Extra support

Research-based therapeutic measures that target and ameliorate the underlying weakness.

Formal adjustments are made to the delivery of lessons to help mitigate the learning difficulty or exceptionality. The underlying content and expectations remain unchanged with accommodations, however. (Example: allowing a student to write tests in a quieter room).

The underlying content and expectations are modified and/or simplified for the sake of the student. (Examples: allowing student to use a calculator on a test when other students can’t; allowing students to bring word-banks or “cheat sheets” into certain tests, etc)

Third Academy does not offer any specialized programming for gifted learners.

Gifted education: If you want to learn more about gifted education, check out our comprehensive guide. It’s the first of its kind: it covers different kinds of gifted schools and programs, and a whole host of issues parents face in finding the right option for their gifted child.

Tuition

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$10,000

What Third Academy says: In addition to tuition fees, we parents should be aware of Bus Service (if needed) at $2,300 per year, Community chest donation of $2,000 and miscellaneous fees for uniforms, field trips and special lunch days.

No child will be refused enrollment due to their parents inability to pay..
Third Academy was founded on the premise that it would be a community school that serves families with students with special needs. We have accomplished this since 1997 by:
operating as a registered charity
making our fee structure as affordable as possible
applying a “sliding scale” to tuition so that families pay based on their “ability to pay”
offering flexible payment plans to manage your budget
partnering with the Prosser Charitable Foundation and other supporters, as well as offering the Gift of Literacy Bursary program, to enable families to afford to attend
relying on the volunteer commitment of families to offset the costs associated with operating the school for the benefit of the community as a whole

*Number of students in 2015 who attended one of McGill, U of T, UBC, Queen's University, University of Alberta, or Dalhousie University.

**Number of students since 2005 that attended one of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, University of Chicago, Oxford or Cambridge (UK)

Next Steps

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